Monday, October 03, 2016

Homeless plans ‘not ambitious enough for Ireland’s children’

The Government’s plans to tackle homelessness do not do
enough to address the issue of family homelessness, a leading campaigner
has said.

Speaking at the Focus Ireland Conference, the charity’s
founder Sr Stanislaus Kennedy said ‘Rebuilding Ireland’, the
Government’s action plan on homelessness and housing, is “welcome and
ambitious”, but insufficiently ambitious for the needs of Ireland’s
children. She said the plan “does not add up for families who are
homeless”.

Focus’s 10th annual conference, centred on the theme ‘No
Going Back – building sustainable pathways out of homelessness’,
featured national and international speakers and analysed the Government
plan.

Little prospect

While Sr Stan said there was much to praise in the plan,
which she described as in many ways “strikingly ambitious”, she
expressed concern about Minister Simon Coveney’s statement that the
Government’s main aim with regard to family homelessness, “is to ensure
that by mid-2017, commercial hotels will only be used in limited
circumstances to accommodate homeless families”.

She said this meant that the plan offered “little prospect of a real home for many hundreds of children”.

Pointing out that Focus is succeeding in helping families
out of homelessness, she said the numbers becoming homeless are also
rising such that it was hard to see the Government reaching its 2017
goal.

August was the charity’s most successful month so far in
terms of rehousing families, according to Focus’s Roughan McNamara, who
told The Irish Catholic it rehoused 33 families that month, but
that 72 further families had become homeless while it was doing so.

“Normally we get one family out of homelessness every day,” he said,
“but two to three new ones come in.”